Victor Davis Hanson: How Marxist Ideology Infiltrated American Classrooms

when it comes to my policy farmers gives it to me straight so there's no surprises it's your coverage you should never be confused you hear that an insurance provider with a conscience we're a choir but yes we have that too straightforward coverage you can literally understand that's what you get when you have farmers learn more at farmers.com underwritten by farmer's truck or fire insurance exchanges or affiliate products not available in every state kick off the fall season with takovas our quality western boots are handcrafted with 200 meticulous steps for broken in comfort right out of the box and each pair is built for all falls festive moments from game day to tailgating to outdoor festivals and long weekends find your perfect pair and customize them with complimentary boot stamps and branding at a takova store near you or shop with us anytime at takovas.com the world is divided you between the oppressed and the oppressors that comes from marx through post-modernism how does that sophisticated literary and philosophical criticism filter down through k to 12 very easily it goes into the school of education and they tell you there is no good there is no evil there is no standards and they would tell students you are a victim and you do not have to follow white power structures and you can see where it went downhill hello and welcome this is victor davis hansen in his own words we're on our saturday edition and we usually do something very different but we're the whole episode is going to be different we're going to continue with questions from our viewers there's going to be questions continuing on the iran war on israel and many questions on culture and especially in especially or at least one of them on the classics so stay with us for that and we'll be right back after these messages many americans are going to have a big wake-up call we have never seen net migration as high as it has been in the last few years this year there have been more people coming to the uk in small boats than ever before you did an extreme thing to the country britain is facing a migrant crime epidemic we don't actually know where they're coming from who they are how old they are why would you let in millions of people who are unvetted if not to change the country from within there is no other word for it demographic replacement england's a blueprint for america it's coming yeah it's just a blueprint thousands of daily migrant crossings a political earthquake threatens to reshape america we are showing there is a new path for politics in our country not all cultures are the same you cannot ban sharia america is a nation of immigrants we are a nation we are a nation of immigrants we're a nation of immigrants the immigration crisis watch now on the heritage foundation's youtube channel welcome back victor davis hansen in his own words you can find victor at his website victorhansen.com is the url the name of the website is the blade of perseus and it has all things victor is there links to his book articles he writes and um podcasts these podcasts are you can find them there you can subscribe and get two articles a week plus a exclusive video and then the podcasts come ad free on victor davis hansen's um they the hour and and 60 minute podcasts um four of them a week come free so all right victor let's go ahead and start with our we we're finishing off with the iran war so we're gonna just conclude because we have a reader lorenzo cardinale is that like um what's her name claudia cardinale yeah what isn't that the same she was in the professionals yeah she died like a month ago two months ago i was sad did she was it yeah i thought she did she did she was beautiful she was her famous role i'm just doing this off the top of my head was once upon a time in the west she was uh charles bronson uh and she and jason robarts yeah she's very beautiful i thought she was of all the italian bombshells gina lola brigida sophia lorenz yeah she was of all the italian bombshells gina lola brigida sophia lorenz yeah she was of all the italian bombshells gina lola brigida sophia lorenz she was the most beautiful yeah definitely although sophia lorenz was the best actress all right so lorenzo cardinale continuing on the iran war and here's the irgc i think a lot of our viewers might have this question as to defending the irgc if the iranian people were to rise up against them how would they fight them the islamic republic prioritizes the terrorist pashtaran army over the regular army which is composed of conscripts and he's saying talking the regular army is conscripts mostly ordinary citizens why not leverage this these disillusioned soldiers they could provide weapons and to unarmed iranian citizens furthermore why doesn't trump unilaterally decide to stop recognizing the islamic republic's government as legitimate and instead recognize the son of reza paslavi as the the legitimate ruler i said beginning the war i wrote an article and said that they should recognize the government and exile even though and then it could be an interim government for about a year before they held elections um very quickly it's one of the hardest things in the world is to for a foreign power to arm dissidents within the internal body politic of the target now israel said to us that there were kurdish people that would they could arm very easily and then they could put pressure and come down but there's so much the persians are only about 65 percent of the population so the last thing there were two things that why the trump administration from what i read stopped that number one they were afraid that that would lead to the islamic revolutionary guard whipping up nationalism against non-persians and turkey and then they did that because of the kurds anything the kurds want to do the turkeys against turkey is really de facto not an ally of the united states and it bullies greece it bullies cyprus it bullies israel it doesn't like us and um so it's it's very hard how do you get the weapons in there if there is going to be a successful revolt it will only happen under one of two conditions the regular army will rebel again i don't know why we were attacking i understand why we're attacking regular naval and army people but the people we need to attack are the revolutionary guard but it'll be the regular army if that happens or things will get so bad that um people have no choice they're so desperate i don't know unders i don't know why right now the land routes um to that eventually end in china and russia or the rail they're not completely closed off there's trucks still at the border and they're importing and exporting things i don't know why ships we should forbid all traffic on the caspian sea you know i don't know why that's happening i've been told that there's only flights now to iraq but somebody i don't know how the yemenis and the houthis have such resources with all these and the other problem and i just want to make a footnote we think the houthis are backward and yemenis and saudis and everybody are sophisticated it's not that way they may be fanatics but they have all been trained in iran for 20 years those revolutionary yemenis houthis have gotten iranian expertise they're very good with ballistic missiles and drones they have state-of-the-art equipment and they're receiving in real-time chinese photo reconnaissance so they hit the airport the other day in saudi the the saudis want us to join in but then they tell us don't do this don't do that and we we've made it clear that you've been blackmailed by these people forever and if you and kuwait and the uae and oman you have 600 fighter aircraft if you would have joined us we could have you know taken it out so it's only going to happen a dis a successful uprising if things get really bad or if the regular army navy regular officers turn on the revolutionary guard on the idea that they have public support then i and to make them to make it get very bad i'll be very candid you will have to hit dual use targets you'll have to hit bridges and highways and what and that's a problem because you don't want to hurt the iranian people we should remember there's 93 million people in iran and everybody says it's like the missile enigma well there's only 10 percent is for this go yeah but that's nine million people that's larger than more most middle eastern countries so they can turn out a million people on the street and make it look like they're fanatic they have a nine million fanatic now they don't have that you know that nine million is a lot but it's not 80 million or you know what i mean or 90 83 million most people hate the regime so but it's going to be very hard uh this can't disclose what went on at this conference, but we had a number of Iranian experts. And I would say the general consensus, both Farsi speakers and experts in Iran, was that they were very pessimistic that the people were going to rise up. That was the consensus. And my own view is something's happening right now with our administration and Iran. And it seems the foreign minister that met with Kerry to do the Iran deal, Javar, or whatever his name was, he gave a lecture the other day. I think it was abroad. And it was the Turks translated it. And he basically blamed the regime. And he said, you people are paranoid. You have enemies everywhere. If it's a genuine speech, it was online. So you can see there's some fracturing, but I get the impression that the administration, Trump and Rubio, are now doing the negotiations. And they are telling the Iranians, as soon as the midterms are over, we're going to unload on you. So you better cut a deal because you'll have no leverage. And what they mean by that, if we win, you'll have no leverage. If we lose, you'll have no leverage. It'll be over. And I think when you start reading certain accounts, the odds, as I said last time, 94% of all the elections the last 80 years, the White House party has lost seats. Since 1944, it's only been George Bush and Bill Clinton who's in one of their two midterms saved. They didn't lose seats. They got tiny little increments. And one was because of the anger, of impeaching Clinton when the economy was booming. And the other was a goodwill after 9-11 toward Bush. But when you have president, all, and they had very good popularity. Bush was up to 85% after 9-11 for about a year and a half until Iraq. And then he got very low. And same thing with Clinton. He got very low, but then he got back up again. But right now, it's very hard for a president around 40% to stave off defeat. I have a little theory, or I should express it, that when you look at the massive foreign investment that's coming in, when you look at these, basically, they don't understand the tariffs at all. They look at it as the critics' protection. All he's saying is, you multinational companies, you have no tariffs if you locate everything over here and build cars or steel, whatever it is. And their governments don't like that, obviously, because they want their own people. But these people are capitalists, even though they're in socialist countries. So, they're bringing trillions of dollars of foreign investment. And one of the reasons that the left launched that little fake AIE, we're going to blow up the world, they were trying before the midterms to force Republican candidates to disavow AI. And why were they doing that? Because the productivity, if you look at what AI is doing, it's going to lead to a quantum leap in GDP within a year. And so, what I'm getting at is, you know, it's going to lead to a quantum leap in GDP within a year. And so, what I'm getting at is, all the indicators long-term are spectacular with foreign investment and new plants, job. The unemployment rate is now only 4.2. And we have the lowest poverty rate in history. We have the highest per capita familial rate. The Atlanta Federal Reserve said that readjustment is going to grow 5%. We created 140,000 new jobs. We created 130,000 new jobs in August. And we're up 30,000. People said it was disappointing. And then GDP is 2.3, even with the oil this high and everybody pulling their horns in because they're worried. So, what I'm getting at is, things are pretty good except for gasoline and housing. And that's a result of the Iran war, but also the 21% aggregate under Biden, which nobody really understands. And so, probably a lot of young people that came out for Trump, they'll probably be the ones that are going to be the ones that are going to be the ones that are going to probably stay home. I hope they don't, because it's a binary situation. Their futures will be doomed if we have. It'll be like European youth, you know, when you're in your 30s and you wait for your dad or your uncle's government job to open up so you can inherit it. But I'm afraid that they're going to not see that. And then as soon as the election's over, by the end of the year, the economy is going to really boom. And next year, it's going to be. And then, they're going to take credit for it or Trump won't get any credit for it. But the funny thing is, when Obama said, I have a pen, I had a phone and I have a pen from 2014, 15, 16, he ruled with executive orders. He had all of those. And they weren't just foreign, they were everything. He even got the Iran deal and all that stuff. And Bill Clinton set them all up. And so, when he was rebuked in 1994, he started doing the same thing. They have record numbers almost. So, you can imagine what Trump will do. His attitude will be, well, everything's going to get really great and we're going to be fine, but these socialists are going to try to derail it. So, I'm just going to veto every single thing and I'm going to rule by executive order. And I'm going to do. And he's not going to say I'm a tyrant or anything. I'm just following the pattern of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Who both got really terrible midterm setback. Yeah. All right, Victor. So, last question. This one's a historical. Not last question, but last question before we get to Israel. This is a historical one and it's about the Iran war. So, he says, is there a potential parallel between MacArthur handling the surrender of Japan and the potential plan for Trump getting Iran to surrender? So many similar things. Let me think about that. Well, some, but we have not had. No Iranians anywhere in the Middle East have been fighting Americans on the ground row. We were fighting as early as early 1942 by land and sea directly against the Japanese. So, we have had no land war either in Iran or around it with the Iranians. So, that's a difference. If the questioner means. Did the United States defeat Japan by using the Marine Corps to get close to it and then counting on sea and air power? Yes. What we did was we destroyed their infrastructure. 70% of the urban area of Japan was destroyed before the atomic bombs were dropped. The problem with atomic bombs, they didn't really. They only had two. Really only. They had a target list, but they only had two big cities that had been untouched. And. So, submarines had made it impossible for oil to get in, to get into Japan or for Japan to supply troops overseas. And then the U.S. Navy controlled the shorelines. And that's exactly. It was an anaconda strategy just like this. And will. If that regime collapses, would there be a radical change like happened in Japan? Yes. And we. There would be a government that would be pro-Western like the post-war Japanese. But would we send a pro-consul like MacArthur? No. I don't see that happening. That was a very confident age in American history where you didn't have to be perfect to be good. So, MacArthur went in there, remember, in 45, and he had absolute rule. And he did things that the media would have torn him to pieces. He kept the emperor in power. And he opposed a lot of the military tribunals. And then he gave women the right to vote. He redistributed the power. And he did land. He was a revolutionary until the Korean War. And that really hurt him, of course, because of the invasion of China. But he was a very successful pro-consul. But there are the same strategies to weaken Japan at wartime we're doing with Iran. We're squeezing it economically and by sea and air. Well, we're going to turn to Israel after I welcome back a sponsor, VAR Watches, V-A-E-R. We tend to forget that civilizations are remembered less by their politics than by what they made. The tools, the objects, the things built well enough to outlast the people who built them. For most of the last century, America made things. Then much of the old productive economy, watchmaking, packed up and moved overseas. Today's sponsor is trying to bring a piece of it back. VAR, that's V-A-E-R. V-A-E-R is a Los Angeles watch company whose goal is pretty straightforward. Bring America watchmaking back. They now assemble watches right here in California, as well as Arizona, Rhode Island, and Alabama, with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. These aren't fashion accessories. They're proper tool watches. Sapphire crystals, premium materials, and full waterproof warranties, meaning you can actually swim or dive with them on. 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So yeah, please, if you're looking for a watch that doesn't monitor you and send all of your vital signs into cyberspace, I would highly suggest our VAR watches. All right, Victor. So let's turn to Brian Kent. I'm sorry, I forgot to mention the guy who asked about the comparison between NASA and NASA. Now with Iran and Japan, his name was John Grote. Brian Kent, however, writes, I was wondering if you could comment on the alleged attacks on Christians and clergy by Orthodox Jews in Israel. It sounds so un-Jewish and this hasn't been reported in our country. Are these spitting and violent attacks common? Is the reporting accurate? Also, where do you get accurate information regarding the West Bank in general? It is commonly reported that Jewish settlers are perpetrating violence against Arabs and not the other way around. Where do you find unbiased information describing the reality there? Well, after October 7th, there were a lot of young, zealous Orthodox Jews, mostly in the West Bank. And when attention was directed at Gaza and people were furious about the massacres, there were a few young, zealous Orthodox Jews who were in the West Bank. And they were in the West Bank. And there were a lot of young, zealous who did take advantage of that and have delusions of, you know, greater Israel, we're going to take over this. But they're not the majority. And when they do perpetrate violence, they're arrested, unlike Gazans who do it. I don't think the Gazan police arrested anybody. I don't think the Palestinian Authority, their heroes, are still giving money to people who committed suicide bombings years ago. So, yes, that happens. Most of the Christians, remember, about 180 to 200,000 of them are Arabs. And they're in Israel for one reason. People got to remember that because they mostly fled from the West Bank. Bethlehem used to be 85% Christian, and it's down to 20%. Tucker said that Israel drove them out. They didn't. They either went, they were afraid of the West Bank. They were afraid of the West Bank. They were afraid of the West Bank authorities. So, they either went to Europe or the United States or Israel. But there are, yes, the answer is there are zealots, and they have attacked civilians in the West Bank. And they've been, the international outcry is horrendous. They've been, the Israeli government's been blamed, but they do try to stop it. And they're a small percentage of young people in Israel. And the Israelis are trying. They have a, they have a large problem because trying to have orthodox sects enlist in the army. So, part of it is the secular Israelis and also people on the right who are in the army, they're making the argument, while the orthodox community is the bulwark of Israel in some sense, because they have large families or observant Jews. But in the past, they have been exempt, many of them from military service. And so, if you're exempt from military service, and there are elements in that community that are doing things that could cause, they're not exempt now. They've been fighting now. But there's, that's a big controversy. But you can't have a situation where orthodox Jewish youth are inciting violence and then making the argument that we don't want orthodox Jews in the IDF. But the, and then the answer about where do you get your information? I try to, I, I try to read propaganda from the Arab world, and that's mostly Al Jazeera. Or I try to read things like the Indian Times, Hindu Times, Hindustan Times. It's kind of center-left, pro-Palestinian. And then I read the Israeli Times, Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post. And between all of that, you can get a pretty, they all have one thing in common now. They're all turning, I think the Israeli press has turned on Netanyahu. And it's kind of a, there's no doubt about that he neutralized Gaza. And I said with Jack, you know, and I, I did a video that, it's a funny type of genocide if you say that the population grew from 1.2, I said that with us, to 2.4 in Gaza, the Arab-Gaza population. And at the founding of Israel in '48, 18% of the population was Arab and there were about 500,000. And now they're over 2 million and it's 22%. Genocidal regimes that target particular groups do not allow them to increase their percentage of the population and double their population. Much less do they extend voting rights, the right to form political parties, the right to hold office in the West Bank, more or less the same as true of Gaza. If you're a genocidal regime and you want to wage genocide, you don't exit the entire country, take out 20,000 of your own people. If Hitler wants to commit genocide in Poland and wipe out the Jews of Poland, which he did, you think he would have pulled out all the troops out of Poland? Every single German would say, get out. And then he would say, all the German infrastructure we built here, airports, and we're going to give to you free as a goodwill jester. And oh, by the way, Poland, the Third Reich is going to give you electricity, water, power, and we're going to provide vaccination. I don't think so. So this idea of genocide, and of course, as I said, otherwise, was it prevented? Yeah. All you had to do was when you had your country with 25 miles on the Mediterranean with beaches and you had two million, two and a half million people, and you had no Israelis, and you got 40 billion in international American and European aid. Just don't build hundreds of miles. I don't know how many miles. The highest estimate is 500. And people have said there's only 250 miles. Nobody knows. But they do know it costs billions of dollars. And they stole it from the people. And then have some elections. Don't have one election kill off the opposition and then cancel them. So they had plenty of chances to avoid their fate before October 7th. And then after October 7th, they had 20 days. All they had to do is turn back the hostages, stop shooting 4,000 rockets that 20 days at Israel, and turn over the perpetrators. That would have been the best thing that if they had just said, the people rose up and said, you never had an election. You killed the Palestinian authority. Get out. We want to turn over the 4,000. people who did this, because we didn't do it. And we're going to have free elections. There wouldn't have been any. Israel wouldn't have gone in there. So it's very hard to hear all this, especially from ignorant young people on campuses, unfortunately, which I'm at a lot. Yeah, who appear to only get the propaganda from the West Bank or Gaza and not anything else. On the sea. I said that to about six protesters. River to the sea. I said, you know, what are you talking about? Well, the sea. Well, what sea? The Gulf. I said, no, it's called the Mediterranean. What river? Oh, I don't know. The Tigris? No, it's called the Jordan River. And there's no Palestinians on the sea. No, not one. No, they're in Gaza and they have a beautiful beach if they hadn't blank blanked it. So go out and read that. And these were not just Stanford students. They were students from the Middle East. And they had little signs when I would walk by. S-H-H exclamation. Protesters sleeping. Do not disturb the protesters. And really, the other thing I couldn't, all the tents were the same color, the same brand. And the signs were all. So somebody was paying for that. Maybe it was the Jordan River to the Sea of Galilee. That's what their Israelis have showed them. I don't know. You're going nowhere. All you had to do is, in 1948, the U.N. voted and they. they established the borders, UN commission, and had they not invaded, tried to attack them in 48, had they not attacked them in 67, if they had not attacked them in 73, they wouldn't have lost all that land. But usually when you start a war and you lose, you lose some territory. And by the way, when Egypt preempted and attacked Israel in 73 and was responsible for the most part of killing 7,000 Egyptians, what happened to that? Israel gave back, what, 23,000 square miles, 6% of Egypt. They gave back the whole Sinai. They would have given back all of that territory if those countries had had a treaty with them and said, we will not go to war with you. But they didn't. All right, Victor, let's turn to, it sounds like he's an Israeli the way he writes this. This is a small point. When you discuss Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the United States, you always reference his security detail from Israel, the Shin Bet. While in our country, the U.S. Security Service takes over his protection as with a head of state. We work with the FBI who shares intelligence and the CIA, but the service had exclusive, the service, the secret service, I think he means, had exclusive responsibility. For his safety in the U.S., particularly at the General Assembly for the U.N. Yeah, I don't think I've ever said Shin Bet on this term. I've said the Israeli Security Services because I didn't, I never claimed to know which particular branch protected Netanyahu. I did say that a person from a foreign country that has issued a visa to go speak at the U.N. is sacrosanct. So when Omandami said he was going to go speak at the U.N., he was going to go speak at the U.N. So when Omandami said he was going to arrest them, the only possible thing that could happen, he would have had to have NYPD fight the Secret Service or something, or the FBI. That wasn't going to happen. But I never really distinguished which Israeli, because I didn't know. I don't know the Shin Bet. I don't know who's doing what. And the whole thing is so confusing because I'll confess to you, we have a lot of listeners, not a lot, but a lot of people who are listening to this people listen to Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Candace Owens, mostly younger people, and they'll write me. And they'll say, you know, don't you, that, why are you lying to the American people? You know that the Mossad packed explosive in Charlie's microphone. There was no bullets. There was no Tyler Robinson. There was no, he didn't engrave anything. And that sniper, shot the sniper, or some have variants on it, that Tyler Robinson wasn't, didn't do it because of trans things or that he was working for the Mossad. And then he shot the microphone to blow it up. And that, and the Israeli Mossad was behind it. And then I got more things. It's almost every day. You are a tool of the Israeli. You know, don't you, that the Mossad, Shin Bet, kill started October 7th because Israel, there were some, uh, accidental killing when the Israelis came in with helicopters and things they couldn't quite distinguish the Palestinians from. And there were some civilians that were killed, but the idea that Israel staged October 7th is just absolute fantasy. But yet I get that all the time. Don't look at the evidence, Alex Jones, look at the evidence, Candace Owens, look at the evidence, Tucker Carlson. And, and it's, it's frustrating because that didn't happen. If there were even a remote chance of that, the forensics would definitely show a different, uh, wound on Charlie Kirk than what was there. I just got, Tucker just the other day said, we know, and he was talking in this vein that Roosevelt, uh, deliberately started World War II by, uh, staging a provocative, uh, he wanted Pearl Harbor to happen. The radar, they were, the radar didn't, you know, that kind of thing. The radar had picked them up and they did. He did move the seventh fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. And the chief of naval operations objected to that. And Admiral, I think Richardson objected because it said it was dangerous. He did it to deter the Japanese. He, he really felt that we had eight old battle. Well, there were World War I battleships and we had three carriers and that would, we didn't really know how much the Japanese had and that would deter them. It was naive. And when they saw before the actual bombing radar, if you can read the history of that radar spotting, it was incompetence. It was, it wasn't directed. Just ignore that, that the idea that Roosevelt staged, you can make the argument that he was doing things provocatively by sending Lynn lease to, um, Britain. You can make the argument that it might've been, I don't know, it might've been naive to, to supply the Russians with 20 to 30% given their history of mass murder. And you can argue that it was true. It was dangerous to, um, be at the, at the, at Pearl Harbor with, without sufficient forces and that the Philippines had not been sufficiently reinforced. They had B-17s, they had P-40s, but maybe they need all, you can argue all that, but you can't argue. He did it intentionally to get Americans killed. So we go to a war. All right, Victor, let's welcome back, um, our sponsor for the Saturday show, Pure Health Research. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels, or reduce swelling in your legs and feet, this message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America healthy again. And two of their best-selling health supplements are leading the way. First is Liver Health Formula. Over 100 million Americans have a sluggish liver, riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile on the pounds, and make you feel tired. Liver Health Formula takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special ingredients like artichoke extract and milk thistle. This is one of the easiest ways to slim down and revitalize your energy levels. Next is Lymph System Support. If you struggle with fluid buildup or swelling in your legs, ankles, or feet, this one's for you. The natural ingredients in Lymph System Support help gently flush extra fluids and toxins out of your body. And right now, for a limited time, you can get 35% off Liver Health Formula and Lymph System Support and all 50-plus health supplements at Pure Health Research. Head over to purehealthresearch.com, that's purehealthresearch.com, and use coupon code VICTOR at checkout. That's purehealthresearch.com with coupon code VICTOR to save 35% on your order today. purehealthresearch.com. We would like to thank Pure Health Research for sponsoring the Saturday Victor Davis Hanson Show. All right, Victor, let's turn to a cultural question, and this is a doozy. The question's a little bit longer, so bear with me, but it's about postmodernism. It's from Jeffrey B. Brennick. How can I reach Victor for a question regarding his interview with Jillian Michaels? She asked why the EU has gone crazy. Victor responded that they emerged from World War II, having suffered devastation and turned to a utopian socialist model. It seems to me that postmodernism, or French philosophy, instilled in my sons the notion of oppressed oppressor. Rationality is a construct of the oppressor, etc. I have a son who is a socialist based on postmodernism. My son said it has been taught since grade school with an emphasis on collectivism. It is my impression that the self hatred of the West is a direct result of postmodernist philosophy. Where have I misinterpreted history? You haven't. I've talked many times about the awful triad of postmodern critics and philosophers. Besides Sartre, the three were Lacan, Derrida, and Michel Foucault. He was the biggest booster of Khomeini, and he was very influential in French cultural life. And one of the reasons that France offered Khomeini a haven and allowed his cassettes to stir up trouble was not just because they thought stupidly that the socialist-Islamist alliance would be French-generated. And then once Khomeini took over, the socialists would knock him off, and then they would invite the French in to have an oil concession, etc. etc. But where did the people of France come from? Where did the people of France come from? Where did the postmodernists come from? I'm talking about not the symptoms but the causes. What caused people, especially in France and not Britain, to allow lesser degree in Germany. What was the prompt? And why didn't the English, why didn't the Americans? We imported that. And yes, I was a visiting professor at Stanford University in 91 and 92, and the entire classics department that I had been trained at 15 years earlier had some of the best philologists in the world. They were Austrian, they were German, they were French, but mostly British. There were some Americans, and they taught us how to write in Latin and Greek. We had to be able to sight read in Latin and Greek, archaeology, numismatics, epigraphy, all the associate papyrology. But what happened when this new group came in and said, there are no facts, we're going to study Foucault, we're going to study Derrida, we're going to see who's the feminist hero and who's the evil male in every Greek text. That came from. That came from France. And it took over. And if you look at the dissertations in America, in literature, from 1985 to 2000, there are things in my field, there are things like the sexual ambiguity of Dionysus cult in Asia Minor, or the transsexuality of this, or the construction of manhood, or the art, the poetic, the poetics of toxic masculinity. And the Iliad. It's all worthless. There were scholars in Germany from 1933 to 45, and you can read their articles and some of their books, and they really canonized the Spartans. And they defended the heloteach, the lesser. And they used terms like ubermenschen and untermenschen. And they said that nice things about Greece were that there was a military pure race, the Spartan. And basically, it was code that the Mycenaeans and people like them were natural slaves like Jews. Everything is discredited now. Nobody would ever quote any of that stuff. It was so bankrupt. It destroyed German scholarship for years. The same thing happened with the 80s, 90s, and now it's starting to die out. And where did it come from? It came from the shame of defeat. So first symptom, was after World War I, there was a million French casualties almost at Verdun, when the whole campaign was almost a year long. And when it bled out Frenchman, that prompted modernism. What is modernism? It means in art, what you see on the canvas, or what the painter or the sculptor, it's not what the eye sees. It's impressionistic. Sometimes it can be good. It can be good. You know, like Renoir or Cezanne, but mostly it's abstract and terrible. Or it's, I say, see, spot, run. And then I just break it up. See, spot, run. See, spot, run. And break up the sentence. And that's a poem. Or what would, I won't use the word for urination, but urination Christ. So you urinate on something. people. That is postmodern. So, modernism destroyed classicism and traditionalism, and it came out of the shame and losses of World War I originally in Germany and the French sacrifice. It got into postmodernism, started in the late 40s and 50s, Sartre and all that. Camus turned on it. He didn't want any of it. And my point is that why did it not? It didn't emerge in the United States. RGIs came home triumphant. They went to school. The American economy exploded. What happened in France? The French army was the bulwark of Europe. If you read what Churchill was saying, with the RAF and the British Navy and the bulwark of Europe, the bulwark of France, the three-million-man army that had a higher participation per capita than Germany did at the time, which had better tanks than Germany and had some fighters that were better, it would stand like it did in World War I. It collapsed from May 10th to June 23rd. It crumbled, and it was occupied and humiliated, and France lost the war. And the worst part about it was the people who had been there, the people who had been there, the people who had been there, bailed them out and saved France was the British, who took in De Gaulle and had a government in exile, and the hickey, white, trashy Americans. And they came over, and they liberated France, the British. And then what happened? France was going to be still an imperial power, and they lost Southeast Asia, Vietnam, and they lost their African possessions, Chad, and then the crown jewel of the French empire was Algeria. The Piednois, they were brilliant French farmers and business people. They had created a prosperous Algeria. You may have said that it would have been possible had they divided the country, because they had about a 70% French population of about a million and a half people. But no, De Gaulle said it's not worth it, and he gave up Algeria. They quit the Algerian. The Algerian war, and not only did the Piednois flee and abandon Algeria, but more importantly, over the next two or three or five years, about a million Algerians followed them into France. So my point being, when you combine the humiliation of losing the war so quickly, and then such a. Read Mark Block, Strange Defeat Block. It tells you exactly why. When you're in 1925, and you don't want to talk about, they shall not. pass and the Verdun is not in the textbooks, or if you're in Holland and you're trying to rename destroyer so they don't, the word for destroyer, because it sounds too warlike, you can see that the people who won World War I did not want to fight World War II to save themselves. And the people who lost World War I, the Germans really did. And then it spread in Germany because Germany was not just defeated in two wars, but the second war, it was occupied and humiliated and dependent on the Americans. And so they, what does that do? It said, there are no facts. It's all socially constructed. There is no good. There is no bad. There's no reality. There's no such thing as classical art. It's to the degree that you have great literature or art by, because you have standards, quote unquote, and you can say that, uh, Michael, Michael, Michelangelo's David is more beautiful than Victor making a clay figurine because it has perfect bodily proportion. That is just a elite capitalist, white male, Christian, uh, arbitrary set of criteria, aesthetics. And who is to say that a person in the Amazon jungle who has representational art or impressionist art, in other words, he gets a clay figurine, he puts two eyes and he makes it. In five minutes, that's just as good. You're by it. That is what it is. Or novels. Why does a novel have to have a hero? Why does a novel have to have bad? Why don't you have an anti-hero? Why don't everybody is bad? Or everything about the West is always going to be bad. And that's, that reflects the humiliation in Europe of World War II of destroying European culture within 21 years. The war to end all wars and the Versailles treaty, 19 years later, you've got a war 20 years later. And that's the problem with post-modernism. So yes, the questioner is absolutely right. His son was nursed on post-modernism. How does that sophisticated literary and philosophical criticism filter down to K to 12? Very easily. It goes into the school of education and they tell you there is no good, there is no evil, there is no standards, and it's all arbitrary. So if you have students from the inner city and they don't speak English very well, then you call it black English. And you don't think they speak well, but they don't think you speak well because their grammar is just as important as yours. Or a teacher says, I can give you one example and I'll shut up. I was teaching a class in Sophocles and we had a new education building at Cal State. And I won't mention it, but the secretary didn't like me very much because I got a grant to do research. And she took my grantee and hired her to help her do her research work. So finally, I would come in. I said, you were supposed to search six texts in Greek. Well, you didn't do it. She goes, well, I'll just make a name, Jane, Jane Doe. Well, Jane Doe said that you don't need me. So she, and so I went to her and I said, well, I don't need you. And she said, I had $8,000. I applied against 50 people. I won this grant from a foundation. And I'm just trying to have her help me write to check my sources and things. She goes, I don't care. The next thing I knew I was in the lab school. The lab school is an archaic little room where the bathrooms didn't work. It was, and I had the worst times, you know, eight in the morning or nine at night or something. And so the point that I'm making is that I was in, finally, a new building. She retired, and they gave me a nice classroom, and unfortunately, it was in the education building. So I was lecturing about Sophocles' Ajax and the hero Ajax and what early Sophocles' grammar and syntax were like compared to one of his later plays, like the Oedipus Cyclonus. Anyway, we hear this noise, and I can't repeat it. It was the N-word, white trash, oaky, green. Bingo, and then the F-word. Okay, so I get out. I thought it was some kind of mob. I go in there, and it isn't. There is one, there's a wall, and on each side of the wall of the corridor, there were students in an education class. And the professor said, can I help you? I said, yeah, I can't hear a thing. She goes, well, we're just teaching about what happens when you have power. And how you exercise it. Well, I said, well, who has the power? She said, the people screaming. So I said, well, who's going down the gauntlet? Because there were people down, and they were students. They didn't have enough black students. So they had little placards, black, and they had a lot of Hispanic students. And then people were yelling all these epithets so that they would see what the world was really like, that you could see racism. And I said, you're creating this. I have never heard these words spoken in my life, and I live in a 90% Hispanic community. You are generating this. She said, no, because these are oppressors, and we have to know how to deal with them. I said, you created them out of nothing. They don't even exist, so you have such a small supply of oppressors and such a great pool of oppressed that you have to create them, and they have to have name tag. I started arguing with her, and she goes, I'm going to file a complaint. I said, you're disrupting my community. You're disrupting my class. We can't hear it because you're shouting the worst words. If any of my students said that, they would be expelled. And that was the first time I really saw that binary, that the world is divided between the oppressed and the oppressors. That comes from Marx through postmodernism. Into the classroom next door to you. Into the classroom, and then that was the education building. That's my long-winded circumlocution. That those people that were yelling that, they weren't undergraduates. They were teaching credential students, and then they would go out and teach K through 12, and they would tell students, well, you are a victim, and we're not going to apply the standards to you. So if student one comes in 20 minutes late, they'll say, it's okay. It doesn't really matter whether you come in late because you are a victim. Right. And you don't not have to follow white power structures that stress punctuality and attendance. Yes. And you can see where it went from downhill. And then all of a sudden, nobody was coming in on time. Yeah. And nobody knew how to speak proper English. And nobody ever studied Latin. And nobody ever, and the grades were all inflated. Yeah, and everybody was enmeshed in this imaginary world of oppressor and oppressed. I would get students, and I would have them in humanities courses or history. They'd come in and say, Professor Hanson, could you write a, I want to get a master's, could you write a recommendation? They weren't my student classics. I had them in the GE, and that would show their transcript, and it would be like 3.8. Wow. And then I said, but you have to take the SAT score. And they'd come back, and they said, I got a really good score. I said, what, is it 5.10? I said, 5.10? It's about the 70th percentile. To go to the type of schools that you think you deserve to get in, because they were very confident, you need about 740 minimum or 700 in verbal and analytics. Well, I got almost all A's. I said, I know, but your A's aren't worth anything, because they were given for criteria other than excellence. And they said, well, I did all the work. I said, the work was not rigorous. And the teachers graded on criteria other than merit. And they didn't do you service. And if you would take Latin, and you would get the actual grade that you deserved, if you didn't get high enough grades, and you really wanted, and you did, and I felt you did have aptitude, I will spend three hours a week with you, and I will tutor you. And at one point in 1995, I had 19 independent studies of two hours a week. My whole life was giving people independent. All right, Victor. I have a question on that Maginot line of the French relative to our own expenditures on the military. But first, let's take a break and go do some messages, and then we'll come right on back. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I have a new book out on September 8th of this year, and I think you're going to enjoy it. It's called Counter-Revolution, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement. It starts right after January 6th, and it details the lack of popularity of Donald Trump, the invective that he endured, the five civil and criminal trials, the effort to get him off the ballot, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the two impeachments earlier, one in which he was tried as a private citizen, and yet he came back. How did he come back, and why did he come back? I explain in the book how he defeated his primary opponents, how he was outspent. He had a hostile media. And he defeated the Democratic machine and Kamala Harris. It starts on January 6th. It ends pretty much now, in May of 2026. What's the title about? Donald Trump is not a revolutionary. He's not a revisionist. He's a counter-revolutionary. This time around, he is not addressing just the symptoms of the progressive project of the last 50 years. He's talking about the causes, not just an open border, but how to stop illegalization. How to stop illegal immigration entirely, not just crime, but sending the National Guard in to make sure cities are safe, not just an Iranian nuclear threat, but ending that threat that seven other presidents had identified but did not act on, not just addressing the transgender issue or the Green New Deal and all of those issues that are so dear to the Democratic Party, but ending them, defunding NPR and PBS. He is a counter-revolution to unwind and to roll back the entire progressive project of the last 50 years. I think you're going to like it. It's pretty interesting. It chronicles the greatest political comeback in our recent political history. Thank you very much. I'm Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Welcome back. Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor is on social media. You can catch him on X. His handle is at BD Hanson and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. So, Victor, just this is not a reader question. It's my question. Given that the French had huge expenditures on their Maginot line and then it was just so skirted around by the Germans and they lost so quickly as you suggest. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Just skirted around? Well, with a bunch of tanks. I suppose that makes a difference. Okay, but wait. Can I ask my own question? Then you can go about where I'm wrong there. Anyways, it failed for the French. The actual Maginot line did not fail. It was a huge capital expenditure. But it failed to keep them independent of the Germans. They were occupied. But it wasn't because the fortifications. The Germans never in their initial. Yes, later they came in, but they had already lost the war and the people were demoralized. And they but they it kept the Germans were paranoid about it because the usual routes of invasion that were through the flatlands to France were blocked by the Maginot line. In fact, they even tried to copy it with the Siegfried line was a joke. The problem was that Belgium and the north said to the French, if you build that across our border, we will be neutral or we'll fail. We'll we'll we're not going to fight. Well, they weren't going to fight anyway. And the French did not have the money to incorporate all of Belgium behind the Maginot line. So they went all the way up and they stopped. At the border and the Ardennes, most of the Ardennes was in Belgium, and they said to themselves, OK, we're not going to fortify our border. The border with Belgium, because they will be a sacrificial lamb. So we'll stop. And it's thirty five hundred feet and hilly and one lane roads and it freezes in winter and it's kind of mucky and spring with rains and it's a dense forest. and the Wehrmacht and Blitzkrieg can't get through there. So then we're going to defend it with our army and the British will come over at Calais with 300 and they will help us patrol the border. And nobody in their right mind ever thought that von Manstein would take over the plan and say, we can go through the Ardennes Forest. And they surprised everybody and they turned up at the back of the majority of the French army and they split the British from the French and the British had no way of helping the French and they evacuated and the rest of the French were done for. But the Maginot Line area was never, at that point the French army was collapsing. The Germans then did go through, but nobody wanted to fight, it was over. Okay. But still, this is my question. They had a huge capital outlay for that. Anybody who looks at that Maginot Line and all the underground barracks underground. It was 7 or 8% of GDP from the 20s onward. Okay, so now we have a military that's looking for, I think they got okayed for $1.5 trillion budget, which is a huge capital outlay. Given your conference you were just at, what is your confidence, that our military wouldn't be surprised by something? I mean, you said the Germans surprised them, but what is your confidence that they're laying out capital in the right place? Well, I mean, I don't want to be too explicit. I just had a long talk with four-star generals, retired, and a lot of people. And I want to say I understand why a lot of you don't like Pete Hexeth because you think he's too loud, but that's PR. You have to look at what's happened. When he inherited that Pentagon, they were short 40,000 troops, and we were shown, told, lectured that it was because they were too fat or they were in gangs or they were video games or they were tattooed or they used drugs. He said no. The reason is if they're all coming from the people who like to be in combat units, 101st, 82nd, you name it, 1st Mountain Division, and they come from multigenerational families, grandfather, Vietnam, father, 1st Gulf War, grandson, 2nd Gulf War, and their kid is now 18, 4th generation. And they think DEI meant they were not going to be promoted. All the ads to join the Army were all about pregnant flight suits, for pregnant women and trans. A lot of it was exaggerated, but it was DEI, DEI. Mark Milley came up and said, read Professor Kendi. Lloyd Austin testified before Congress that he was going to investigate white supremacists. They investigated, and they didn't even tell people. They just released the report in December a year later, and they kept it quiet. So he turned that around. The second thing, we have been getting weapons from, basically, Northrop, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boston Group. And a lot of them are great. But a F-22 fighter cost $140 million, and we only have about 130 of them. An F-35 fighter cost about 90, and we only have about 400 of them. A B-1 bomber from the Carthage, the Reagan years, it cost $340 million. B-1, we only have about 45 of them. A B-2 is over $2 billion, and we only have about 20 of them. And we're facing now people that are producing, Ukraine is producing a million drones a year. So the reason that we took those 11 B-1s out, the reason that we took those 11 B-1s out, the reason that we took those 11 B-1s out, of Britain as quick as we can, because we were afraid three semis were going to drive up of Iranians, and they were going to take the tarp off, and each of them would have 200 little drones with 100 pounds or something on them, and they were going to swarm and land on each one of those planes and blow them up and take them all out. So the warfare has really changed. So what they're doing now, and we heard this again and again from people, companies like Andoril and stuff. So they're telling them, we need, yes, we, we love General Atomics Predators and Reapers and all that. Those are kind of like the mothership, but we also need 1,000, $2,000 drones. We need, and we're going to make 300,000 under HEXA. That's amazing. Last year, the total was 30,000. He's increased it by 10, but we need a million. And we need, we are, when they came in, when Trump came in, there was not enough, hellfire missiles, there was not enough Tomahawk missiles. There was not enough Patriot missiles. The hellfire now are about 40% depleted. The Tomahawks are about 60% depleted. And the Patriots are about 25 or 30% depleted. In fact, Ukraine wants Patriots, they're out. And they're telling people like the Greeks, well, you have about a hundred of them and they're 20 years old now. So their shelf life is over. So you need to renew them. So you go buy them and give us your old ones because they still work. That's absurd to let, especially when early on said he wanted to send missiles into Athens. So my point is that we are in a revolution right now, and we're trying to go back to the World War II model of William Knudsen, Henry Kaiser, Henry Ford. We're going to make great weapons, but they're not going to be, have to be perfect. And we're going to flood the zone like we did with 50,000 German Jews. We made 12,000 P-47 Thunderbolts. We made 15,000 Mustangs. I think we made 15,000 Hellcats, 12,000 Hellcats, 12,000 Corsairs. We made 4,000 B-29s. And we were making a B-24 an hour. So we can do it. So we need to get a radical change where we're going to, if China goes in, to Taiwan, we need to have a bunch of oil tanker. They look like oil tankers or something. And then all of a sudden they take off a canvas and 5,000 drones swarm, the, the beaches. And then we need ships two, 300 miles off that just blanket with hypersonic missiles, but affordable lots of them, but we're not going to be able to stop them with pilots in $130 million plane. The best plane that the F-22 is the best plane in the world. The F-35 for its task is the best plane in the world. They're marvels of American brilliant engineering, but they're so expensive that we made 300,000 military and logistical aircraft in World War II. 300,000. We don't have all of our military. We probably have bombers and fighters, 3000 at most. So yes, we're unprepared, but we're trying to change. We're getting more recruits. We've got, we're getting meritocracy and we're looking at bases. We're getting out of the Middle East because the reason we're there is Iran. And we're trying to neuter Iran and get people home and not exposed to gratuitous Houthis. Let them handle it. So yeah, that we're in a revolution right now. I think that's the best thing that has happened. And all I hear about people is Pete Hexeth is showing off his muscles. Pete Hexeth has tattoo. Pete Hexeth with a womanizer tattoo. Pete Hexeth. I could say the same thing about George Patton. I'm not saying that he was George Patton, but Patton had affairs. I mean, Kay Summersbee was the chauffeur of Eisenhower and there were rumors they had affairs. I don't know if it was confirmed or not, but I'm not, you can't, what we're doing right now under Hexeth and his advisors, he's not just Pete Hexeth. He brought in all the people who were disgruntled about, what was happening. And he's under enormous pressure by the major defense contractors. And who are the major defense contractors? Lobbyist ex four-star general. So then they write op-eds and they say things like he's incompetent. Not all of them. Some of them, some of the best admirals and generals we have are people who work for those companies and say, these companies have to change their advocates from the inside and say, general dynamics and Lockheed and all these companies, the country has got to make chief stuff. I think if you look at what general atomics is doing, the blue brothers, they have a balanced strategy where they're making mothers very sophisticated. We've lost about 50 of them in Iran, but their reapers and Fred latest predators were the best in the world, but they're very expensive, but they can, they can be a mothership to creating thousands of little, ones and direct them without any humans involved. And they're working on that. So I think we're at an exciting time and we're going to address it. The biggest problem I see is we're spending $1.4 trillion. The interest now is $1. It was $1 trillion. And now with the high interest rate, it's going to go up to about $1.3 trillion. And it's over $3 billion a day in interest. So we've got to address that. Yeah. Well, that's good news. You think that the military's expenditures are keeping up with the changing nature of warfare. And I guess that's the big thing. It's very slow to move the Pentagon bureaucracy. It's way overstaffed. And he's doing other things that are very unpopular, but very necessary. He's cutting the number of generals. We had more generals and admirals than we did in World War II. And he's going to promote people to being a general based on merit and not their superficial pay. Their appearance, their gender, their sexual orientation. He's not going to have drag shows or any of that stuff on bases. And it's going to be an equal opportunity military. And it's going to be very good. It is good now. Yeah. Well, Victor, let's have one last question that's more cultural and something about the classic. I would value, this is from William Lassiter, I would value hearing Victor's opinion, if he is willing to make it available, of the current trend of teaching Latin using the natural method rather than the grammar translation method. I myself am a grammar translation fellow, but would be at least slightly persuaded to attempt the natural method should Dr. Anson be favorable. Yes. What do you think? The Catholic Church does that. Does what? In Europe. They do the natural. When you say the natural method is, how do young people, let's say you take somebody from France and he comes over here for three years. How did he learn English? Did he study English grammar? No. He listened to people and they spoke. But the problem is with classical Greek and classical Latin, there is nobody who speaks it. So there was no absorption or natural method. So what people are trying to do is to create kind of like what happened in the 19th, the Zionist movement. They had ancient Hebrew, but nobody really spoke it. And the common tongue of Jewish communities was Yiddish, kind of a mixture of European languages, Semitic languages, and parts of ancient Hebrew. So they created modern Hebrew. And they modernized the ancient. So then they began teaching people and that caught on. So today, that's the national language of Israel, modern Hebrew. So there are people who says we can do the same thing with Latin. We can get chapters where we speak Latin and we talk in Latin and then we correct our grammar or we do this. So I think what we need to do is if you believe in that method, then you need to have people who have been trained classically. So they know what the grammar is so that they could correct people in speech. And you could have, it was kind of like Esperanto in the 19th century. People thought they could create a universal language incorporating romance languages and Germanic languages. That was a big hit in the 1920s. The most sophisticated Manhattan salons, the people would speak Esperanto. But I learned it classically through grammar. And you can see what happens when you don't do that, when you go one or the other. So today's students, if you ask them, can you distinguish when you use who, nominative, whose, genitive, to whom, dative or indirect object, accusative. About whom are you speaking? They don't know any of that. They just say who for everything. And then they would say, well, who cares? Well, that's the gradual. That's the gradual erosion of an authoritative rank. That's what happened to Latin. With the collapse of the empire in the 5th century AD, and there was no central government, and people were not communicating or traveling back and forth, French started to emerge, Spanish started to emerge, Italian started to emerge from Latin. And Latin became a non-spoken language outside of the clergy. That's a long harangue again. Wasn't Italian, French, and Spanish sort of bastardized versions of Latin, like they were slaying people? Yeah, I'll give you an example. So the Latin word for horse is equus, right? Yeah. And there is a derivative in Iberian called caballos. And so if you're out in Spain, and the vandals have taken over, and you can't get into Rome anymore, and you're isolated, and you've got a mixture now of vandals and Iberians and Romans. Then caballos becomes the word for horse, that Iberian word. And then it's caballos, and nobody knows what equus is. What generally happened is the correct word became relegated to science or academic parlance, where precision was needed. And the vulgar or slang word became the German word. To a lesser extent. Germany was on the other side of the Danube and Rhine, so it was always going to be separate, never incorporated. Same thing with a lot of parts of Ireland and Scotland. But the Romance language, Romance meaning Romans, Italian especially, the two closest to Latin are Spanish and Italian, then French, and there are some languages of Eastern Europe that are close, Romanian, for example. But my point is that if you say today, if you say today in modern Greek, the word for wine, it's krasi, meaning it's from krenomi, it means to mix up stuff. And that was a slang word that came into Byzantine Greek when the Greek culture collapsed. The classical word is oinos. If you go to Greece today, you'll see the word oinos in the word, the equivalent. The equivalent of fine spirits or an alcoholic beverage or fermented spirits. It's a rarefied term. And mostly it's, if you say, you can tell a difference. So there is a vulgar word for urination that starts with a P, right? That is a bastardization of urination. That is Anglo-Saxon. Every foul word. In English, the SH word for defecation or the F, the terrible four-letter word that starts with an F for intercourse. Have you noticed something? They're either monosyllabic or disyllabic, and they're Anglo-Saxon-Germanic, and they are used by the common people in a pejorative or profane fashion. But if you go to a doctor and you say, I can't P-I-S-S-S, how dare you? You use the word urinate. If you talk about defecation, you use the word defecation. You don't say the other word. And so that shows you that a lot of the slang came from the Balkanization, and it's mostly Anglo-Saxon-German words that are incorporated. English is such a rich language, we have a whole dual vocabulary of Greco-Roman words for elevated conversation. And I had a professor once, Mark Edwards, said, Victor, Victor, I really admire your language. And I said, why? He says, you have a lot of Latinate in it. You have a lot of polyxyllabic. And I said, well, what'd you think? Well, you're from a farm, so I thought that everything would be SH and all these terrible words, because we try to emphasize that we should always use the verb. I never had a memorandum to ourselves, but by habit, it's not, you know, it's not the same thing. Just try to address questions from the people. Try to address corrections when I've said things that either have said things that are wrong or people think I've said things. But try to address it at least and try not to use any foul language and especially not to engage in conspiracy theories such as exploding microphones or the Mossad behind Charlie Kerr or October 7th or Pearl Harbor was staged. Yeah, that's called click baiting. We call that the hysterical style, Victor. Yeah, paranoid style. The paranoid style. All right. Well, thank you to the audience for joining us this Saturday. We'll be back to talking about the presidents next week. This is just a special edition of Viewer Questions. Thank you, Victor. We're going to talk about Ulysses S. Grant, I think. And one of my favorites that historians hate is Calvin Coolidge. Yes. All right. Thanks to everybody. And thanks to Victor. This is Sammy Wink. I'm Victor Davis Hanson. And we're signing off. Please like, share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. And also check out my own website at VictorHanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition. When it comes to my policy, Farmers gives it to me straight. So there's no surprises. It's your coverage. You should never be confused. You hear that? An insurance provider with a conscience. We're a choir. We're a choir. But yes, we have that too. 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